Countdown to the Royal Divorce - Part 19

You will all have been in sympathy with me these last few days because of the enormous pressure that I have been under to attend today’s event at Windsor. The telephone has turned white with constant ringing, the air has turned blue, and my face is bright red through constant bellowing at various members of the family. “Fuck off, Anne, you daft bint”, I exclaimed, “I am not going, you know why I am not going, and I will not go even if you run out of Union Jacks”.

Some prize tosser gave the idiot father of the groom my number. I had sincerely prayed that I would never have to spend time talking to the buffoon again, but no such luck. The first time he called I affected to be the proprietor of the “Curry Favour” restaurant in Datchet. The twat called back two minutes later to order a beef Jalfreeza and a Peshwari naan. I told him the only meat we served was Welsh lamb – a reference to his ancestry that I have mentioned before, and that did the trick for a couple of days, until those memories had fallen off of the stack. When he called back, I followed dear old Bron’s advice and whistled down the telephone: that worked, “Sorry old chap”, he muttered, “got to go for a pee”.

Autumn joins in the frantic search for the sun-glasses.

Of all of the grand-offspring of Liz, I have always been strangely fond of Pete. He is totally harmless, and is quite good at filling up a room – I always counselled them to get him a career as an item of decorative furniture, but do they listen? Naturally he wanted me to be best man. “Sorry, Pete, my old flower, but haven’t they told you? Protocol demands that you get a professional", and I gave him the number of a gentleman called 'Jeremy Twink', who, apparently not only gives an interesting speech but concludes with an unusual dance.

I heard the bride-to-be in the background during several of these calls. She is a colonial management consultant. I had always hoped that Canada was populated by citizens too intelligent to allow this sort of role to be adopted. It probably cost them a fortune to find some gullible foreigner on whom they could dump her. “We need to synchronise our synergies”, I overheard on one occasion. “She’s really good with hors d’oeuvres” was Peter’s explanation. Daft sod.

Autumn continues to wear her portable satellite dish, so that she can keep up with the hockey scores. Today, the Moose Knob Sealclubbers are playing the Calgary Mincers.

Out of kindness, I finally managed to persuade Peter that he should record the Cup Final and watch it later, rather than listening on an earpiece during the ceremony. His team, Cardiff City, are the underdogs, and he is prone to join in with the chanting of the crowd particularly when things are not going well. I told him that the exclamation “Who’s the wanker in the black?” would not be taken well by the Right Reverend Fortescue, and nor would “You’re not singing any more” be viewed kindly as the Windsor Mountbattens struggled through remembering the words of the National Anthem.